


Show No Mercy

by 221b_hound



Series: Guitar Man [33]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BAMF John, Gen, Graphic Violence, do not threaten the children of Holmes and Watson. Just don't., mentions of sexual and physical abuse, threats of abuse to children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-26
Updated: 2013-02-26
Packaged: 2017-12-03 16:51:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/700520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson is meant to be a good man, and he is. But even good men sometimes do terrible things when they are pushed to the edge; when there are monsters and those that must be defended from monsters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Show No Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> I was thinking about John Watson shooting Jeff Hope and not batting an eyelid. I wondered what might make him choose such a cold-blooded action again. Then this story happened. It's pretty dark. But basically, don't threaten what Sherlock and John love: don't threaten the people they would die for. THey might do worse than kill you for it.

John Watson is meant to be a good man, and he is. But even good men sometimes do terrible things when they are pushed to the edge; when there are monsters and those that must be defended from monsters.

The Yard used to think that one day it would be Sherlock Holmes who committed murder, and to this day none of them know that John Watson was the man who shot that serial killing cabbie and saved Sherlock Holmes’s life.

John had killed people before, under the auspices of his uniform and his oath to the Crown. He may not have had the vested authority when he shot Jeff Hope, but he used the same principles and clear morality to make the decision to pull the trigger on that night in London, as he had on days and nights in Afghanistan when there was no other choice but to defend himself and his comrades.

Nobody but Sherlock really knows about Baron Adelbert Gruner, either.

Sherlock Holmes had taken the case to investigate the murky Gruner, and been thrashed for his pains. Properly, debilitatingly thrashed. John had tended to Sherlock’s wounds himself, rigid with fury and almost incoherent with fear for his friend for a whole 24 hours, until the danger passed. And John was not a man who panicked easily.

In pursuance of the case, to collect vital evidence, John attempted to pass himself off as an expert in Chinese pottery. He’d done pretty well, considering. Not good enough, obviously, because Gruner rumbled the deception just as John reached the end of his performance. He’d distracted Gruner for long enough for Sherlock (limping, battered, but not as ill as had been broadcast to the world) to find the encrypted data drive and the laptop on which it played. The proof needed to disentangle that idiot besotted fiancé from the vile man’s life, and to ruin the Baron for good and all.

Sherlock was in the next room when John was unmasked, and he trusted to John to keep the foul man occupied while Sherlock pounced upon the evidence and collected it in a satchel. All the photographs. All the members of his little circle of perverts. All those abused and marked women.

Nobody but Sherlock heard the Baron threaten John’s life, in slow, cruel, deliberate detail, about what the Baron would do to John in the very near future with a hunting knife and a set of fishhooks and a bottle of vinegar.

Nobody else heard John reply, in his quiet, confident voice, that he wished the Baron luck with that, or saw that scimitar smile that John unsheathed. He knew Sherlock was in the next room, and nothing could make him afraid now that his friend was streets away from death’s door once more. He was going to bring down the man who had hurt his friend, whatever it took.

But it wasn’t that very real threat to his own life that made John do what he did.

It wasn’t even what the Baron had done to Sherlock that made John do it either, although that was enough to earn John’s fierce enmity for the rest of time.

What made John do what he did was Gruner, recognising that he was failing to terrify this unmasked imposter, making a serious error of judgement.

“You have a daughter, don’t you, Doctor Watson?” Gruner had said, in his oily way. “Thirteen, isn’t she? Perhaps she could form part of my photo collection, do you think? Or that pretty boy, Holmes’s nephew, who visits you so often. Pretty children. A little young for me, normally, but they would be such a beautiful addition to my gallery.” He smiled, a thin and confident smile, “Because I know where they live when they are not with you. I know where they go to school. I know all about little Violet and little Ford. I do my homework, Doctor. I do my research very, very well. Should I be arrested, I have but to give the word. And those children are so very beautiful and delightful.”

Baron Gruner gave far too much credit for John Watson being a civilised man. A law-abiding man. A merciful man. He saw that fierce, frostbitten rage in that good man’s face and laughed, because he thought he knew who that good man was. He thought he was safe, because he knew that John Watson believed that the Baron would do exactly as he threatened.

Then Kitty Winters – nineteen and scarred for life, in her skin and in her soul – burst in and threw oil of vitriol in the Baron’s face. Helping Sherlock Holmes locate the data and laptop hadn’t been enough for her, so she took her revenge more directly, for how the Baron had abused her and sold her and traded her image after he’d done with her, and she fled.

That was when John did what he did.

Or rather, did what he did not do.

He did not act.

He did not move.

He waited one beat. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. While the Baron screamed and clutched at his burning face, and Sherlock ran towards the unholy, banshee sound in the next room.

John waited six vital seconds, calmly watching, before snatching up a carafe of water and washing and washing and washing the Baron’s ruined face.

Sherlock burst through the door and then he watched. He had heard the threat. He believed it too. He was ready to slit a throat and damn the consequences. He’d killed men in worse ways to protect John Watson. What wouldn’t he do to protect their children?

“Don’t help him. He deserves what he got,” said Sherlock, voice as bleak as judgement.

“I didn’t help him,” said John, quietly and coldly, and if he was aghast at himself it didn’t show. “The acid burned out his eyes. He’ll never look at anything again in his miserable fucking life. And no-one will look at him without disgust or revulsion ever again.” He leaned down low over the whimpering wreck. “They will all know what you were and what you are, and you will never forget it for an instant. And you don’t want to know what I’m capable of, if you so much as _breathe_ our children’s names ever again.”

When Gruner groped under his jacket, drew a gun and, shaking, held it to his own blistered, melting face, John took it gently from him. “No you don’t,” he said, mild and implacable. “No you fucking don’t.”

Gruner screamed and screamed and screamed until the ambulance came.

The soundless video surveillance footage from Gruner’s own home security showed just this one room – for some reason the cameras in other parts of the mansion had failed to record – showed the true culprit, Kitty, who was never found.

(Mycroft looked after Kitty, protected her, found her a new home in Canada, got her the best of counselling, the very best care, and the best education and she turned out all right, considering.)

That footage – seen by the police and the Crown, and no charges were ever laid –showed poor Doctor Watson, frozen in horror for vital seconds before giving what first aid he could. It showed good, kind Doctor Watson disarming the poor man trying to kill himself. It showed a medical man sticking by his Hippocratic oath.

But Sherlock Holmes knows how merciless John Watson can be in protecting those he loves, and he isn’t at all shocked or appalled by the knowledge. He once died for twelve months and committed acts of atrocity in the same cause. He’d planned to kill Baron Gruner, but he liked John’s choice of punishment much better.

These are great men, and mostly good men, but they are human men, and they will not suffer harm to come to those they love.

They. Will. Not.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Slayer's Show No Mercy.  
> The plot comes from ACD's The Adventure of the Illustrious Client.


End file.
